King Arthur in America: No 41 (Arthurian Studies) - Hardcover

Lupack, Alan; Lupack, Barbara Tepa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0859915433 ISBN 13: 9780859915434

Verlag: D.S. Brewer, 1999

Über diesen Titel

Reseña del editor:

Aspects of the Arthurian legends have been incorporated into America's own mythologies and its literature, film, social history and popular culture. This study focuses on American reinterpretations and offers detailed treatments of major authors traditionally associated with the Arthurian legends, including James Russell Lowell, Mark Twain, Edwin Arlington Robinson, T.S. Eliot and John Steinbeck. It also explores the important use of Arthurian material by authors not usually considered in an Arthurian context (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner) and by lesser-known writers. Among the topics addressed in the chronological survey are the beginnings of American Arthurian literature and the vastly different reactions to Tennyson's lofty idealism, the Lost Generation novelists, and reinterpretations of Arthurian tradition in the works of contemporary writers.

Nota de la solapa:

KING ARTHUR IN AMERICA analyzes the tremendous appeal of the Arthurian legends in America by examining the ways that Americans have found to democratize the Matter of Britain and to incorporate aspects of it not only into America's own mythologies but also into literature, film, social history, and popular culture.

The only study to focus exclusively on American re-interpretations of Arthuriana, King Arthur in America treats major authors traditionally associated with the legends, including James Russell Lowell, Mark Twain, Edwin Arlington Robinson, T.S. Eliot and John Steinbeck. But it also explores the important use of Arthurian material by authors not usually considered in an Arthurian context -- authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner -- and the Arthurian works of lesser-known writers like humorist Max Adeler, from whom Twain was accused of stealing his idea for Connecticut Yankee, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a prolific and popular nineteenth-century novelist.

Among the topics addressed are the beginnings of American Arthurian literature and the vastly different American reactions to Tennyson's lofty idealism: satire and parody, as in Edgar Fawcett's play The New King Arthur, and a respectful moralizing of knighthood, which reveals itself particularly in the youth group movement and in the development of a body of didactic literature for children; the period from Twain to the twenties, in which realistic rather than romantic approaches to the legends prevailed and scholarship began to influence Arthurian retellings; the Lost Generation novelists' use of Arthurian motifs, especially those related to the wasteland and Fisher King, themes thatthey found in Eliot's Waste Land; and the re-interpretations of Arthurian tradition in the fiction of Steinbeck, whose Acts of King Arthur was the culmination of a lifelong interest, and of other contemporary writers like Walker Percy, Thomas Berger, Bobbie Ann Mason, Donald Barthelme, and John Updike, each of whom adapted the legends to distinctly modern, American concerns.

A concluding chapter analyzes Arthurian themes in American popular fiction and film and demonstrates the extent to which the Arthurian tradition has influenced American popular culture, from commercial products to advertising, from toys and games to comic books and television shows, from art to architecture.

A comoprehensive bibliography offers the most extensive listing ever assembled of primary and secondary sources of American Arthuriana.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: D.S. Brewer
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0859915433
• ISBN 13: 9780859915434
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 398